For at Least One Song, EMPiRE Done Real Good

Remember when I gave EMPiRE the brush-off? I’m completely sympathetic toward anybody who wants to go their own way, but what the original preview tracks had laid out was … well, a slightly off-beat electro bop kind of thing not unlike a lot of what POP had done, basically the chipotle mayo of the idol world. I thought, if this is how WAVEX is going to handle their joint project, good for them (much money will likely be made), but I’ll kayfabe pass.

And then their actual debut MV carries a tune that I want to swim around in like a lake of warm butter:

At the very least, that’s some good emotional manipulation right there. It’s lousy with Kentacore, but the best of Kentacore, those choral sweeps and swells that make people want to go on the journey again, and then again, and then again. It’s nifty songwriting. I even had to get over myself a little bit for it — after the original releases, I was prepared to be quite whelmed by this song, and approached it accordingly — and what a waste of energy that was.

But, “for at least one song,” I mean that. I was grappling with how I wanted to orient toward EMPiRE after this, a very good tune that fits the general bill of Homicidols.com, and I think they’ll get the You’ll Melt More! treatment — featuring where appropriate or treating as an element of general interest at other times.

And what I’m referring to are the tracks that had previously been Watanabed, which were released onto Soundcloud:

Still not knocking my socks off!

See, this is what I’d been trained to expect to get. I’m enjoying the crap out of it, for the record, but in the same way that I enjoy the crap out of Negicco or Vanilla Beans, because it’s good and interesting. “Cool style.” I’ll obviously post up damn near anything if I feel like it’s appropriate to what I’m trying to do here — but is EMPiRE appropriate to what I’m trying to do here? Just enough, I guess, to handle appropriately.

Still pretty happy that they chose a big power pop tune for the first MV though. It is not “cool style” at all!